"Publish and Read" contract with Wiley concluded
All German research articles in Wiley journals to be published open access under new transformative agreement
Germany’s Projekt DEAL and the publisher John Wiley & Sons have entered a ground-breaking transformative agreement, in line with the objectives of the Open Access 2020 initiative.
Projekt DEAL, a representative of nearly 700 academic institutions in Germany, and Wiley announced today a countrywide partnership agreement. Under an annual fee, this transformative three-year agreement provides all Projekt DEAL institutions with access to read Wiley’s academic journals back to the year 1997, and researchers at Projekt DEAL institutions can publish articles open access in Wiley’s journals.
The agreement will be made public in a month’s time.
In another key aspect of the agreement, Wiley and Projekt DEAL will establish an open science and author services development group focused on innovating and accelerating new publishing approaches. The partners will also create and host a new annual symposium for early-career German researchers focused on surfacing cutting-edge ideas on the future of research communications.
“Wiley is excited to undertake this important partnership with Projekt DEAL. Our partnership and joint projects reflect Wiley’s commitment to the research community, with whom we share a belief that advancing scholarly research and accelerating the creation of knowledge has a profound and lasting positive impact on society,” said Executive Vice President of Research at Wiley, Judy Verses. “Wiley and Projekt DEAL both believe that we can work together to improve and lead the way in which knowledge is created and shared more openly.”
“With the agreement now reached, an important milestone has been achieved, " explained Professor Dr. Horst Hippler, former president of the German Rectors' Conference, speaker
of the Steering Committee and head of the DEAL project. "We have achieved a core goal: a fair pricing model, which will allow us to make research accessible in an affordable and sustainable manner. It is revolutionary that we are taking this path to an open access publication practice together with Wiley. I would like to thank the Max Planck Society for their support with the final contract signing.“
In order to enable the signing of the Projekt DEAL contract with Wiley, the Max Planck Society, as a member of the Alliance of Science Organisations behind the Projekt DEAL Consortium, founded Max Planck Digital Library Services GmbH. “Following the request of the alliance of research organisations in Germany, we have been happy to organise and implement this national contract with Wiley. This is in full accordance with efforts such as OA2020 that the Max Planck Society has undertaken over many years to promote open access of scientific publications, to invest in modern scientific publishing methods and to make sure that the copyrights of scientific articles stay where these belong, namely with our scientists“, said Max Planck President Martin Stratmann.
About Projekt DEAL
The Projekt DEAL project was set up by the Alliance of Science Organisations in Germany representing the vast majority of the most important science and research organisations in Germany. The consortium includes nearly 700 mostly publicly funded academic institutions in Germany such as universities, universities of applied sciences, research institutions and state and regional libraries. As part of the project, national licensing agreements are to be implemented for the entire portfolio of electronic journals of large academic publishers.